Janitor.
a1studmuffin
Tech bros reinventing things poorly... a tale as old as time.
And yet Fallout: London - a community-made singleplayer experience - just hit 1 million players. It feels like there's a huge mismatch between what many players want and what public game companies are chasing... they're all going after online MTX and completely discounting singleplayer because it makes less money overall.
This reminds me of the time the Zoom CEO announced he wanted employees back in the office because remote work wasn't as effective. It's easy to assume the people running these companies are competent...
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then "accidentally" disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.
C/C++ still has a huge place in firmware, microcontrollers, operating systems, drivers, application development, video games, real-time systems and so on. It's a totally different space of programming to webdev, which might explain the surprise.
It's one of the worst feelings when you realise that social progress isn't guaranteed, and regressions happen frequently throughout history.
Sometimes the real value of a project isn't its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I've backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money's worth on.
It sounds like you're in the right area by focusing on C. Have you got a GitHub profile? I'd start looking for open source projects in that space and get involved. Many of them have beginner bugs and tasks. Some projects are better than others at welcoming juniors, so check their readme to see if they have any advice.
If you're interested in low-level languages like C and C++, I would take a look at Rust. It's another performance-focused language that complies to assembler like C, but includes some clever design principles to prevent a lot of common C/C++ bugs from being possible at all. Even if you don't end up using it much, it's quite interesting to see a different way of thinking about things to achieve a similar output.
Beyond that, I'd say you need to think about the job opportunities you're interested in and learn what tech they use.
It's just such an odd thing to remake. The old version still held up fine and can be played on PS4 or PS5, plus plenty of people would have gotten it for free with PS Plus. They must have really been banking on the PC platform selling well for all that effort.
Couples costume: Mothman and a lightbulb.